As part of the program for the Hong Kong x Singapore (HK/SG) Photobook Exchange, there will be an evening of slideshow projections featuring the following Hong Kong artists and photographers.

TERRY NG 吳漢曦, HONG KONG
BORDER (2012–2015)

The Hong Kong – Mainland China border has been permanently changing – a fact reiterated with the news reporting that the Frontier Closed Area is gradually being reduced in its size. Established since 1951, this closed area was once expanded in 1962 but now, the whole border area has shrunk.

People from both sides of the border can gain access to the opposite side at the Control Points – which signify a manifestation of the tension between the two systems that coexist side by side. Yet, it looks as if we can never have a firm grasp of the transformation of the situation.

It is what prompted my thoughts on our ever-changing border, which may show us the answers to the many questions arising from this transformation.
~Ng Hon-hei, Terry (吳漢曦) (b. 1981, Hong Kong) received Postgraduate Diploma in Photography from School of Professional and Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong in 2012. He is currently studying Master of Visual Arts in Hong Kong Baptist University.

WONG KAN TAI 黃勤帶, HONG KONG
’89 Tiananmen: Remains for Collection

An uncanny feeling of nostalgic loss momentously germinated when the image of a young man strangely captured my attention after a twenty-year lapse on a developing dish inside a dark room. In a willy-nilly stance of peeping into the Pandora Box of remembrance, one admits to the time long gone.

Through the aura light coming from the color assessment cabinet, I began an archival examination of some black-and-white master negatives, those taken at a time during the student democratic movement at the Tiananmen Square in Spring 1989, and from which re-searching the youthful energies long lost at Chang-an Boulevard.

Not naturally, witnessing once again the piles of youthful remains sets off the time-travelling imaginative process of their contemporary whereabouts. After all, that remains to be the best of times for Chinese beings when the Chinese soil has been inscribed upon of their blood and tears.
~Wong Kan Tai was born in Lantau Island, Hong Kong in 1957. He joined the Hong Kong Press in the late 1970s and started his long career as a photojournalist. His photographic collections published include ’89 Tiananmen, Land Reclaim and Hong Kong Walled City 2002 – 2007. Wong now lives in Japan and works as a freelance photographer.

CHAN DICK 陳的, HONG KONG
Chai Wan Fire Station (2014)

Chai Wan Fire Station are Chan Dick’s depiction of the daily lives of the Chai Wan firemen as seen from a birds-eye view from the ventilation window of a washroom at his workshop. The images appear abstract and repetitive. The distance from which the photographs were captured compresses the firemen to miniature figurines. In 2015, the work won the Hong Kong Photo Book Awards.
~Chan Dick is a commercial photographer in Hong Kong specialising in still life, interior and architectural photography. His work has garnered him awards in Hong Kong and Internationally.

DUCKY TSE 謝至德, HONG KONG
THE COLONIAL EXPIRED : 1995–2000

Shortly before the 1997 Handover, I photographed many ceremonies of the British retreating from Hong Kong as well as people’s daily life and traditional festivals, hoping to explore with images the transition of a city where east meets west. In my work, you’ll find plenty symbols of a colony, tradition, locals, contrasts, and some “Hong Kong” culture doomed to vanish after the Handover, such as Tiu Keng Leng (Little Taiwan) and serving British troops. The pictures were taken to capture to changes and emotions of Hong Kong identity in transition.
~
Ducky Tse is a prominent documentary photographer in Hong Kong, and a highly productive one at that. He has published a substantial number of publications since the mid-90s including “Close-Up Hong Kong”, one of his several collaborations with Programme for Hong Kong Cultural Studies in Chinese University of Hong Kong. His in-your-face styled street photography, which are clearly influenced by photographers like Gary Winogrand and Bruce Gilden, express well the intangible mental state of the people in the era.

SOUTH HO 何兆南, HONG KONG
The Umbrella Salad

The Umbrella Salad is a series of black and white photographs and videos capturing scenes of the Occupy Movement. Unlike the prevalent documentary approach taken by most photographers to record the events, Ho took an indirect approach filled with symbols and metaphors to representing his personal experiences and the surrounding presences. Scenes of clashes between the police and the protesters are replaced by objects discarded on the road like barricades, umbrellas, used water bottles and tents. People appear small and insignificant against the backdrop of the city, which looks quiet and peaceful amidst undercurrents of intensity and chaos.
~Ho Siu Nam,South, born in 1984, is a 4th generation Hongkonger. Ho graduated from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and obtained his Higher Diploma in Social Work in 2006. Ho has worked for various magazines (as editor and photographer). He now focus on Photography (especially black and white) and get involved in a little bit of writing as well. He loves discovering various photographic subjects from the society in order to express his viewpoints on existence.

PAUL YEUNG 楊德銘, HONG KONG
Yes Madam, Sorry Ah Sir (2014)

Following my concern on the collective behavior of common people, I direct my camera lens to the group possessing power: The Police. People with uniforms always attract me. They look professional, highly disciplined, obedient, smart, efficient and emotionless, which are the images and character the government and hundreds of movies deliver onto us.

I observed the police during their work and relaxation for a few years. I always find a tension between the individual and the collective amongst the uniform. Every police is a human who eats, smiles, gets angry, does stupid things, lacks of self-questioning, have bad luck and loves Hello Kitty. They are ordinary humans, but with weapons and the power to enforce law. On the other hand, they are trained to take collective action very closely and efficiently. Absolute submissiveness to superiors and the peer relationship/pressure always affect their own thought and behavior.

Honghongers like to call policemen as “Ah Sir” and policewomen as “Madam”. It maybe an English tradition from the period under British Colony. This language shows a kind of respect, and even a sense of hierarchy. Through my observation and tableau-like images, I would like to penetrate the Police as a “rigid wall”, and discover a totally different narrative and aesthetics of them.
~Paul Yeung (b.1978, Hong Kong) graduated from MA in Image and Communication (Photography) at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2011. Yeung embarked on his profession in photojournalism in 2000 after graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Yeung has also worked extensively as a photo editor and lecturer. He was a former chairman of the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association (HKPPA), and has received more than 15 awards from The Newspaper Society of Hong Kong and HKPPA. At the Hong Kong Photography Festival 2010, he was selected as one of Fourteen Hong Kong New Generation Photographers.

SHEUNG YIU 姚尚勤, HONG KONG
PHOTO(graphy) + Science Education

Sheung Yiu’s Slideshow consists of two series: (PHOTO)graphy and Science Education. (PHOTO)graphy re-examines photographs as surrealistic objects. Each work in this series plays with some aspects of photographs – the compression of dimension, the signs and symbols, the appropriation of reality etc. It is an imagination of the photograph from a perspective with which photography is a foreign concept.

In Science Education, Sheung Yiu studied science textbooks and went to science museums in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, in an attempt to understand how science is communicated through images, in various forms and styles. Relying heavily on symbolism and metaphors, these photographs manipulate a unique visual language to demonstrate scientific facts and abstract ideas.
~Born 1991, Sheung Yiu is a young contemporary photographer in Hong Kong whose work has been well exhibited and recognized for its witty interrogation of the medium.

DOREEN CHAN 陳泳因, HONG KONG
27.9, 2105

27.9 is a video installation by Hong Kong artist Doreen Chan for a group exhibition held in private Karoake party rooms at Emma Party House in 2015. The video has no meaning.
~Doreen, Wing Yan Chan was born in Hong Kong. Trained in Visual Communication and photography, Chan’s daily life is her main interest and inspiration. Chan believes Images are just the raw materials of her creations”. She integrates images with various mediums to explore the relations between intricacies of surrounding environment and herself.

LAU CHI CHUNG 劉智聰, HONG KONG
LANDSCAPED ARTIFACTS (2013)

We bring destruction to the land, the moment we begin to build.
We construct a myriad of architectural structures on borrowed spaces.
Only to give them up, decades later, and back to Nature,
who reinhabits the land and rejuvenates the deserted artifacts.
Generous and humble, Nature never fails to clean up the messes we created.
The force of Nature permeates and shapes my creation.
Seasonal changes make the process of creating my work a volatile one.
Capturing the ruins amidst Nature,
my work bears witness to lived lives and passed time.
We have made our marks on the land we once walked.
Nature now takes her turn to give it a makeover
Not to turn back the clock, but to transform into an environmental sculpture.
Artificial angular contours lushly laminated.

Let the past sleep. For when the new day comes,
what await us is a contemporary interpretation of the old landscaped artifacts.
~Lau Chi-Chung is a freelance photographer with many years of experience working as art director in TV commercial productions in Hong Kong. He graduated in United Kingdom with a B.A. degree in interior design.

Chung’s work has been exhibited in various countries, and is collected by museums and private collectors. His photography series “Landscaped Artifacts” (2013) won him the New Photography Artist of the year at Lianzhou Foto 2013.

LAM YIK FEI 林亦非, HONG KONG
UMBRELLA MOVEMENT (2014)

This set of photos documented the sit-in protests, known as the Umbrella Movement or the Occupy Movement, in Hong Kong that began in September 2014. The protesters called for a “genuine universal suffrage”, which they saw it is restricted by the decision by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China as the Communist Party has control over the candidate nomination. On 28 September, the authorities unleashed tear gas to disperse the crowds who wield umbrellas and face masks. It triggered more citizens to join the protests, occupying Causeway Bay and Mong Kok. In November and December, the occupation sites were cleared and it marked the end of the movement.
~Lam Yik Fei is the Director of Photography at Initium Media in Hong Kong. Lam also works on assignment for various international media. His works are distributed worldwide via Getty Images and Bloomberg News Photos. They appear on International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Guardian and other leading publications.

DUSTIN SHUM 岑允逸, HONG KONG
BLOCKS (2014)

Dustin Shum utilizes his signature topographic work to depict the relationship between individuals and urban spaces and the transformation of Chinese cities and towns in rapidly developing economy. This time he focuses on the public housing in Hong Kong in which he’s a tenant. Wandering in the public space of the various public housing estates through these years, he showcased to us many scenes that looked ridiculous and surreal. The “Eternal City” in Ancient Rome, where buildings from different historical periods co-existed and overlapped in disharmony, was used as a metaphor of the mental lives of human beings.
~Dustin Shum was born and currently lives in Hong Kong. He graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in Photographic Design. A photojournalist for more than ten years, he now works as a freelance photographer. Shum has received many awards for outstanding documentary photography over the years, including those by the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association, World Association of Newspapers and Publishers, and Amnesty International.

JOHNNY GIN 甄祖伦, HONG KONG
THE ARCHITECTURE OF INSURGENCY (2014)

Since the first barricades were erected as a form of neighborhood defense in the 1500s, these makeshift structures have maintained their significance as a powerful symbol of protest and uprising well into modern times, most recently in Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement, during which major intersections and roadways in the city were blocked off by protesters demanding universal suffrage.

The spontaneous barricades in Central were erected with great expediency and resolve, and seemingly little regard to formal aesthetics. Over time, their configurations were continuously reshaped like communal sculptural objects that are perpetually “works in progress.” These provisional, adaptive structures are viewed as a type of vernacular expression arising from protest culture, representing the material and metaphorical emblems of an anonymous, ideological collective.

Set against a backdrop of Government buildings and monolithic office towers, this somewhat “nostalgic” mode of resistance encircled a singular “privatized public” space, underscoring the dialectical relationship between traditional power structures and their subversive counterparts.
~Johnny Gin is a copywriter and photographer living and working in Hong Kong. His life-long academic background is eclectic: an undergraduate education in English Literature, followed by graduate degrees in Communications and Library Science. He is now enrolled in an MFA Photography program at SCAD HK.

His photographic interest lies in the examination of urban spaces and vernacular environments and the ways in which these spaces inform us about the culture and identity of a city. His personal and student work have been exhibited in Hong Kong and in Savannah, Georgia.

ALFRED KO CHI-KEUNG 高志強, HONG KONG
Nocturne (2008)

Nocturne are Ko’s stark black and white documentary of Hong Kong City at night. The city he presents is void of life and colour, almost apocalyptic. Mundane landscapes, objects, streets and facades become surreal symbols of discontent and rejection.
~ALFRED KO CHI-KEUNG, born in Hong Kong, studied photography in the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada. He returned to Hong Kong in 1977 and has worked as a freelance photographer ever since. In the 1980s, Ko founded the FOTOCINE School of Photography (影藝攝影學校) and the Photo Centre (攝影中心) in Hong Kong. He is also a founding member of the Hong Kong Institute of Professional Photographers. Ko was awarded “Photographer of the Year” by Hong Kong Artists’ Guild in 1992. His works are collected by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and private collectors.

LAU WAI 劉衛, HONG KONG
HERE (2012–2014) & ALBUM (2014-2015)

From the beginning, the camera is used as one of the tools for me in communicating with my parents and our immediate surroundings, I realized that “home” has actually been a place that was both familiar and foreign to me. I do not have an adequate cognition of the past which my parents held before settling at this city, Hong Kong, as well as the cause of choosing ‘here’ to setup our home. What I did know was that the story begins not just with my parents, but with the generation before them.

Thus I attempt to read through the unfamiliar past of our family through the previously kept family albums. At the same time, I step into their past experiences and reminisce the lingering traces of their hometowns and memorable locations based on their recalls.

This allows me to not only further understand my parents and the relationship between the past and the present, but also enables me to create an alternate way in interpreting and continuing a family visual lineage that spans across three generations.
~LAU WAI (b. 1982, Hong Kong) lives and works in Hong Kong. She received her BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2007 and was awarded the Warden’s Art Prize upon graduation. Her works often explore the confluent relationship between history, personal memories and the notion of belonging.